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The Pentagon’s inspector general has expanded an investigation into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s sharing of military plans to include a second Signal chat group, according to reports.
Acting Inspector General Stephen Stebbins announced at the start of April that he was investigating Hegseth’s use of the “unclassified” messaging app to detail U.S. airstrikes against the Houthi group in Yemen. That group included other senior White House and Trump administration officials, but it also included a senior journalist by mistake.
Stebbins’s announcement came before the New York Times revealed that Hegseth had shared details of U.S. military attacks on the Houthis in a second chat, which this time included the secretary’s personal lawyer, brother and wife.
A congressional aide and a second person familiar with the investigation confirmed with the Wall Street Journal that the inspector general’s investigation would now look at both chat groups, increasing the risks for Hegseth who has denied he shared any classified information.
According to one of the WSJ sources, the investigation is focused on who took information from a highly classified government information system and put it in Hegseth’s commercial and unclassified Signal app.
Such information cannot be copied and pasted and must be manually typed out, the source said, and the inspector general is trying to work out who did so.
Hegseth shared some of the most sensitive details in the group chats, sharing the timing of F-18 fighter jet strikes and the time of drone strikes and Tomahawk cruise missiles.
“1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”, part of one of Hegseth’s messages said in the first Signal group chat.
That chat group came to light several weeks ago after the editor in chief of the Atlantic magazine was added to it by mistake by then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.
President Donald Trump defended Waltz at the time saying he was “a very good man”, but on Thursday, news broke that Waltz was being removed from his role.
Trump announced that he was nominating Waltz as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and that secretary of state Marco Rubio would temporarily step in as National Security Adviser.
So far, Trump has continued to stand by Hegseth, with the defense secretary appearing alongside the president on a visit to Michigan Air National Guard Troops on April 29.
The same day, during a rally for his first 100 days in office, Trump gave Hegseth a shout-out, saying: “I have so much confidence in him”.
But according to MSNBC reports, behind closed doors, Trump may be losing his enthusiasm for his defense secretary.
The pressure on Hegseth has not dissipated. He “proudly” announced this week that he had ended a Department of Defense program, which turned out to be one that Trump had signed into law in 2017.
Chaos has continued to reign in the Pentagon as well, with new reports claiming Hegseth’s wife Jennifer Rauchet took on an active role managing Hegseth’s work.
The Washington Post reported Rauchet often acted as a go-between between her husband and agency staffers, and has even crafted messaging that has been issued by the Department of Defense.
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